With the tremendous growth of the Internet, enormous demands have been placed on network infrastructures. To address these demands, modem routers employ various routing architectures, including shared bus, parallel Central Processing Units (CPUs), interface CPUs, and crossbar switch architectures. Many of these architectures further employ a distributed approach, where the performance of routing functions is distributed among the router's main processing components and multiple intelligent line cards installed within the router. Each intelligent line card is typically configured to provide a routing protocol or routing protocols.
Generally, a distributed routing architecture is more scalable, and capable of providing more services than a router with a centralized architecture. Traditionally, this problem is solved by distributing the routing-tables to the intelligent line cards. However, as the number of routing-protocol packets directed to a particular routing protocol increase, a traditional distributed routing architecture becomes congested. Therefore, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention is made.